


Promethian

by quentintarrantino



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, apocalyptic westeros, the road by cormac mccarthy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 22:18:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13222377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quentintarrantino/pseuds/quentintarrantino
Summary: They're carrying the fire.





	Promethian

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by novel the road by cormac mccarthy

i.

 

The beginning doesn’t matter anymore. 

  
  


ii.

 

“We’re going to die.” she says to him one morning when they rise. This place once was a town, she’s not sure what it was called, now it’s empty and whoever had lived here had taken every scrap of food they could find before they left. 

“We’re not going to fucking die.” he replies wearily, but that’s probably just to keep her from panicking. He’s weak, she can see the drawn lines on his face and how it takes him longer and longer each day to find the strength to stand. 

The animals are gone. The storms that never seem to end have been coming every day now, when he goes out to check the traps he returns empty handed. The closest they’ve come to a meal in weeks was the corpse of a horse that hadn’t frozen yet on the road. She didn’t think she’d ever miss the taste of rotting flesh so much. 

They’ve been walking but not fast enough.

 

iii.

At first they travelled through the forest. The snow had been deep but he had feared that bandits and rapers would be on the kingsroad, trying to take advantage of the smallfolk fleeing. 

The nights had been so cold they had wrapped themselves in furs and slept pressed against each other to make sure they could survive until dawn. He had crushed her against his chest, wrapping his arms around her body to ease the shivering.

They lit no fires and spoke no words when the sun went down. Fires attracted both the living and the dead.

 

iv.

She falls on the road when they’re three days away from Moat Cailin and cannot make herself stand again. Her body is tired and she is too weak to go on. 

Laying there on the worn stone she can’t even feel the bite of the ice, she could curl up right here and fall asleep. 

“Get up.” his voice sounds far away as she stares up at his twisted face. “Fucking hell girl get up!” 

“I can’t.” she says stupidly. “We haven’t eaten in days.”

“I don’t care if we don’t eat for another fucking month.” he snarls, grabbing her forcefully by her arms and dragging her into a sitting position. “You’re not dying here. Get up.” 

If she could cry she would. “Why should I?!” she screams back, thrashing weakly against his grip. 

His fingers loosen a little bit. “There’s nothing here.” He’s right. Beyond them is nothing but pristine white and the occasional glimpse of the road. If she were to die he wouldn’t be able to burn her body and she’d rise in a day’s time to resume the march south. 

She does stand eventually. He helps her to her feet. 

There’s an old shed a few paces off the road to stop for the night when the sun begins to descend. Inside they find half a loaf of moldy bread and the count resets. Some of the wood inside is still good, he makes them a fire while she sits, picking at her bread slowly to make it last. 

When it’s down to embers they come together, her cheek against his chest, his arms around her waist. “Next time you do that I’m not gonna pick you back up.” he says when they’ve both almost drifted off. 

The thought of him dying alone out there is more than she can bear. So she continues onwards.

 

v.

After she loses track of the days they find a band of corpses by the road. She lingers behind while he makes sure each one is good and dead before he starts stripping things off their bodies and piling them for her to sift through.

She only takes the clothes but he yanks a bow and quiver from the hands of one and pushes it into hers. “I don’t know how.” she says.

“Tell that to the cunt who kills me and tries to rape you in the snow.” she takes the bow. 

 

vi.

The Riverlands looks strange now that the trident is frozen. 

They meet northerners when the Twins are but two matching specks on the horizon. A woman heavy with child and her husband, both look crazed as if they made peace with their deaths months ago and are simply waiting it out. He doesn’t let them near her, drawing his sword as they edge warily on. 

“Spare some food m’lady?” the woman begs anyway.

“I’m not a lady.” is all she can think to say back.

They’ll find their bodies a few days later and she’ll insist that they stop to burn the pair. He hauls a few stones up from the frozen riverbank to mark the pyres and they stand side by side as the flames lick their bones clean.

She sings a hymn for them. He listens with soft eyes.

“They should be the ones praying for us, little bird. I reckon all the seven hells are better than here.”

 

vii.

He tells her the first night while they flee that he’ll take her to King’s Landing. They’ll find a ship and go to Essos. “The dead can’t swim, we’ll be safe there.” 

“What if there aren’t any ships?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer her.

 

viii.

He watches her as she practices with the bow, arms struggling to pull the drawstring back. They’re a few days north of the Crossroads Inn and the cold isn’t as harsh now, it makes for easier travelling. A rabbit roasts over a fire and she lets the arrow loose only to sag her shoulders in frustration as it fails to meet its mark.

“Here.” his voice is behind her as he presses his chest to her back and corrects her form. Breath hot upon her cheek, calloused and blackened fingers nudging her back into position. 

She still misses when she lets go but the arrow flies sure and strong. 

They eat afterwards and she sings while he stares up at the sky with an unreadable expression. “We’re well and truly fucked aren’t we,” he says to no one after the song is finished and it’s just them. Alone together. “Prophecy and fire gods and buggering promised princes and it wasn’t enough was it?”

It’s the first time she’s heard his voice tremble since he asked her to go with him in King’s Landing. “Only one thing matters now.” she tells him. Survival. The reason he didn’t let her die on the road in the north. He regards her thoughtfully. 

When they bed down for the night she swears she feels his thumb drag itself across the small of her back but before she can think too hard about it she’s asleep.

 

ix.

The Crossroads is abandoned, long since stripped of anything useful, but still they stop. 

She builds a fire and he breaks the ice in the well to draw up pails of water for washing. They’re too tired to drag the tubs upstairs to the bedrooms so they leave them in the dining hall with the hearth roaring. 

Facing away from each other after the baths have been filled they let their clothes drop. Her body is just bones concealed over a thin layer of milky white skin, ribs and hips sticking out painfully. Without meaning to she looks over her shoulder and finds him staring back, only facing forward again when their eyes meet.

The warmth makes her toes curl and she hears an almost sultry moan from across the room. “You know little bird,” he rasps, his scarred arms the only thing she can see when she sneaks another peek. “I feel like a fucking king” She can’t remember the last time she has smiled like this.

They don’t get out until after the water grows cold, he fetches her whatever he can find to dry off with and she wraps her hair up so it doesn’t freeze and go brittle. They don’t need to share a bed like when out in the wilderness but she has grown accustomed to the feel of him against her in the night so she catches his wrist when he goes to leave for his own room.

 

x.

They see the fires first. They blink in and out of existence in the distance and at night she looks out over the flat dead grasslands and sees them rage in the night. Some are bigger than others, their smoke like black pillars reaching skywards. 

They go to sleep listening to noises that could almost be screams sweeping out over the emptiness. 

In the shadow of Harrenhal’s skeleton they find a grim man in a red cloak holding a torch and the stench of death. He’s not alone, scattered are others like him, quietly going about their work. On his hip there’s a satchel full of dried twigs and a flask. 

“They’re moving quicker now.” the red priest calls, bent over a pile of bodies. She watches him crumble up the kindling and pour a little wine so the fire catches quickly. 

They look like ghosts, drifting between the dead, paying them this kindness. “Why are you here?” she doesn’t mean to ask the question aloud. 

“Because we were told to be.” the priest tells her. 

“Let’s go little bird, there’s nothing for us here.” his voice in her ear is what stirs her. 

The man in the red cloak straightens, torch held aloft as the fires continue to burn around the blackened stones of the castle. “Not much farther now.” she nods like she understands while fingers close around her wrist, tugging her back to the safety of the road. 

The priest watches them go until his torch is nothing but a speck of light on the horizon. 

 

xi.

Her hair has become so tangled that she can’t run her fingers through it to braid anymore. It hangs limply from her head and she tries not to remember when it flowed in beautiful red waves, when her mother used to brush it through for her. 

Before they rode south. 

She sits on their bed of furs after night falls with his dagger and begins to hack it away. She had promised herself she would not cry for what once was but he watches her solemnly as tears begin to fall with each lock of matted auburn hair. 

“Come here girl.” he says quietly after she’s done the job halfway. She stares at him for a long while before rising, stepping slowly with the knife hanging limply in her hands until his knees brush hers from where he sits on an old stump. 

His hand lingers over her dirty cheeks as if he means to wipe a tear away but she bends her head before he has the chance, feeling his gnarled fingers resume her work. “It’s only hair.” she mumbles, wiping at her tears clumsily. 

“Aye,” he replies sagely, wise enough not to let her see it fall when he slices it from her head. “And hair grows back.” 

 

xii.

Desperate men are wandering the wood beyond the walls of King’s Landing. They find dead women and children with fresh wounds the closer they go. He insists she carry the bow and quiver with her at all times now even though she isn’t sure she would ever be able to use it.

They walk out of sight, the road is no longer safe and the trees provide shelter. It’s warmer in the crownlands and sleeping without fires burning through the night isn’t as cruel. 

He’s out checking the traps when she hears him, the rage making her blood run cold. She doesn’t realize what she’s doing until her feet are already moving and she’s running through the forest towards the sounds of the fighting, branches whipping around her arms and face. 

The bandits are poorly armed and weakened from disease and hunger but their eyes are frenzied from their hardship. He cuts the first few down easy enough but the last manages to sink a blade into his shoulder and he falls from the force of the blow while she hides just beyond their line of sight. He’s defiant even in defeat, spitting a mouthful of blood into the eyes of the man that felled him. 

Heaving chest and shaking limbs, she brings the drawstring back and the thief falls forward with an arrow in his back. She hears the empty gasps as lungs fail to fill with air until the clearing is still once more.

Snow turns crimson, sweat clings to her brow.

“Fucking cunt.” the arrow is roughly pulled from the body as he stands again, blood weeping from the wound.

“Is he dead?” she asks.

He spits another mouthful of blood out, wiping his lip. “He’s dead.” She doesn’t notice that she’s still shaking until he takes the bow from her and pulls her closer to him. “It had to be done little bird.”

“The world is built by killers.” she echoes words she heard a lifetime ago in the safety of his arms.

 

xiii.

The gates of King’s Landing are open and the city is quiet. The two of them are nothing but ghosts standing in a graveyard. He dug graves once, he told her that night at the crossroads when they were nestled deep in a featherbed. 

He doesn’t stand quite straight anymore, she did the best she could to sew his shoulder but the wound will fester. After all these days and nights wandering with nothing but a glimmer of purpose it’s this that will put an end to all of it. Neither talk about it. 

Aged faces peer out from empty manses. Men wearing beggar’s rags drink fine wine from the balconies of homes that once belonged to families with names older than the Iron Throne itself. 

Those too weak to flee have decided to make their final months rich ones. Somewhere in the skeleton city she can hear voices raised in wanton prayer, begging to be spared. 

“There aren’t any ships.” she’s sure he knows this already but still they walk to the docks. She doesn’t want to climb down all those stairs just to weep at the water’s edge, he clenches his hand around her arm and forces her anyway. 

The port is empty, save for the signs of struggle that saw the last of the travellers off. A small ship is half sunk a ways into the bay, bloated corpses tangled in its sails. Death is a scent she’s grown used to, its the stink of desperation that makes her sick to her stomach. Who knows how many days late they were, when people began to notice the noble houses slipping away at court, when merchants stopped returning on their trade routes. Was it a sudden panic, or sand in an hourglass piling up, grain by grain until those underneath choked to death trying to claw their way to salvation?

She wants to hate him more than anything. How easy now it could be to run him through with his own damn sword while he falls to his knees, looking out at the waves that lay waste to themselves against the rocky cliffs. She let him drag her here, they struggled all this way just to perish in the one place they had both fought so violently to escape. 

In the shadow of the Red Keep she stands, watching tears snake down his burnt and beaten face, and she wishes she could hate him.

 

xiv.

Dark clouds are rolling in from the north, a little closer each time she dares turn her head skyward to look. When night falls the stars are brighter than she ever remembers seeing from within the city’s walls. 

The pale pink stones of Maegor’s Holdfast are chipped, as if the last few years have been more than the combined decades of its existence. Each beautiful stained glass window is broken and anything that isn’t fastened to the floor or wall has been taken. They cast long shadows on the floor as they wander. 

Each corridor holds a story, each jagged stone step a reminder. She hears him follow warily behind, though they both know where exactly she’s going. 

“Girl.” it’s meant to sound harsh- a warning, but it comes out as a plea instead. She halts at the base of stairs that wind up in a spiral, feeling her heart constrict somewhere in her throat. Something deep inside stirs and with a levelled breath she begins to climb.

Her old bedroom is untouched, she stands in the chambers while he watches from just beyond the door. How many lives ago had they stood in these same places and played their roles? 

“I should have left with you that night.” she says softly. His movements are uneven, his shoulder sags under the weight of his injury. She can hear his mortality in every step as he comes to stand beside her. 

The tower is almost black, the moon barely reflecting off his eyes when she stares at him. Only after several moments of silence is she aware that their hands are twined tightly together, the only thing keeping them from floating away like those swollen bodies in the Blackwater. 

Regret is a heavy burden to bear.

 

xv.

He isn’t there when she wakes in her old bed. For a silent moment its as if it was all a bad dream but the sounds of vagrants fighting in the keep courtyard brings her back to the present. She frets that maybe he has left her, snuck away to die in peace, perhaps with a flagon of ale and a whore on his lap. The thought is fleeting, she knows above all that he is tied to her the same way she is tied to him, neither able to stray very far. It’s a curious truth.

When the sun has risen high overhead he finds her sitting quietly in what is left of the throne room, his back is a little straighter and his limp not so pronounced. “Where were you?” her eyes never leave the sharp edges of the iron chair that seems so insignificant now. 

“Dorne.”

“Seems a long ways to walk over the course of a morning.”

He isn’t amused, he never is. “The last open ports are in Dorne. Ships are taking anyone who can make it to the docks.” 

She’s tired. All the struggling and useless fighting, could they not bed down amongst these cripples and thieves to wait out the end? The clouds from the north are nearly upon them, the winds grow more biting every hour. When the red priests storm the gates she could throw herself from the tallest tower in the keep…

His hand cinches around her wrist, as her thoughts were spoken aloud. “There’s no dead in Dorne.” he tells her. 

“Not yet.” 

When they gather up what meager supplies they can find and leave Maegor’s Holdfast for the last time the first snowflakes begin to fall.

 

xvi.

She isn’t sure when it starts happening but they start filling the silence with something other than their thoughts. Words come little by little, small observations and questions piling up into conversation. Neither wants to move beyond the shadow of the present, in either direction. The past is something both inescapable and just out of reach, the future so blurry and out of focus that to speak of it would be to jinx their own chances of success. 

His moods come and go, sometimes all she can get is a stiff ‘aye’ or ‘nay’ in response to her chatter but once she starts she finds herself unable to stop. There’s a relief in it, filling the air with nonsensical prattle so they don’t have to dwell on more sobering topics. Once, a thousand years ago, he would have snapped at her and told her to shut up. Now he endures it all, maybe even offering some words of his own.

This journey isn’t as harsh as the one they just made, sometimes the air still smells a bit like summer when the wind blows through the trees. To the north the clouds darken each passing day, forever looming as a reminder but when she turns her eyes towards southron lands she can’t help but feel hope quicken. 

_ There are no dead in Dorne _ . There are dead everywhere, she corrects him in her head as they bed down for the night. But maybe in Dorne the dead stay dead. 

 

xvii.

The fever comes when they skirt the border between the stormlands and the reach. She wakes to see him writhing with damp hair and shaky limbs. They do not travel that day, instead she makes him lay in their sleeping bag and rest while she tries to gather food for them.

The bow has become familiar in her grip, calluses growing hard and ugly on her fingers. She commented on them once in disgust to him and he had given her a nasty smirk. “You’re not a lady anymore are you?” No, not anymore. 

The winds are bitter today, her face is sore and beaten from where she crouches with her arrow at ready. It takes hours to successfully creep up on a rabbit and when she shoots it she doesn’t kill it right away. Petrified and flailing the poor creature tries its best to escape with it’s chest caught against the steel point and she has no choice but to unsheathe his knife to put its out of its misery. 

He’s awake when she returns, watching her with an expression she can’t place as she works clumsily to prepare dinner. In the spaces between eating and preparing to sleep he holds his arms out to her and she allows him to gather her softly. Her heart beats so loudly she’s sure he can hear it but the silence echoes over the moors, whipping and pulling at their fire as it drapes light over them in the night. 

She wonders what a sight they must be. A man half dead with infection, a girl that’s barely more than skin and salt with less hair than he has. 

 

xviii.

Hope is a poison. 

The grasslands give way to stone that give way to sand. The Narrow Sea glistens just beyond the towers and towns dotting the Dornish coastline. 

The priests overtake them in their pilgrimage. Grim faces with torches, dutifully carrying out their god’s wishes. A lone acolyte follows them for a few days until he draws his sword and threatens to kill him where he stands unless he leaves them be. 

“It’s a kindness.” the solemn robe soothes. 

He sways under the weight of his weapon, unsteady on his feet and weak. “All your little friends are up ahead, who’s going to burn your body when I cut you down?” 

She keeps her eyes fixed on the boy’s back until he melts into the red sands while they struggle onward.

  
xix.

This time it’s he who falls on the road and she weeps because she knows she isn’t strong enough to force him back up. 

“Please.” it’s all she can think to say, it echoes over and over again while she tears uselessly at his clothes. The wound has blackened, dark veins spiraling out every which way and his eyes are glassy. 

It takes a day and a night but he rises eventually, stumbling and struggling as she half drags him off the road and to the sea’s edge. Lights flicker in the distance and ships nest safe in the harbor, their big white sails unfurled and full in the winds.

“Little bird.” he rasps as she builds their fire patiently, trying to disguise the trembling in her lip. She can’t look at him because if she does the inevitable will suddenly become real and she can’t face it. 

She lays their furs out and helps him into the sleeping bag, careful not to touch the wound as he breathes slow and deep. As the fire burns lower she has to strain harder and harder to hear his heart against his chest and it makes her blood run cold. 

“Don’t let them burn my fucking body.” he says after its gone so still she’s sure he’s dead. His limbs squeeze her momentarily and he groans as if it’s taken all his excess strength to do it. She didn’t realize she was crying but maybe she had never stopped. “Swear it to me.”

She won’t swear it, she can’t. 

Instead she palms the scarred side of his face in the dark and presses their cheeks together. His fingers tangle in her hair and he sighs the sweetest sigh she’s ever heard. 

She falls asleep listening to his broken breathing and she’ll never forgive herself for it.

 

xx.

Winterfell is nearly empty when her brother’s bannermen ride through the gates in two neat lines. A strong horse black as night with a cruel gaze and an even crueler master heads the procession with a sled tethered to his mount. 

His ugly face regards her without malice, maybe even a little pity.

The king in the north, longsword still in hand. His white wolf curled around his body for protection in the afterlife. 

There will be more sleds that follow, more faces she recognizes.

 

xxi.

He’s cold when she opens her eyes again.

 

xxii.

The priests are already to the water, the ships in the distance disappearing one by one as she sits beside his body. To the north the clouds roll closer and the winds get harsher.

With numb fingers she pulls the furs over his head, trying her best to look without seeing. She takes his knife and slices the drawstring from the bow, tethering rocks to the corpse. 

If she had the strength she would drag the body to Essos herself, bury him where he would never be forced to rise again. But she is weaker now than she’s ever been so instead she pulls him as far out in the water as she can, the sea lapping at her waist as she stands there with the bundle in her arms. He would have scolded her for wasting all this time, mocked her for crying useless tears over someone like him.

Alone in the shallows she sings a hymn as she lets the furs go and the water carries the weight as far as it can before it sinks out of sight. 

“Sandor Clegane was a good man and a true knight.” she tells no one before she wades back to shore. 

Back to the road.

 

xxiii.

The storm crept up on her. The sky is hidden in thick clouds when she stops at the end of the weathered dock. 

“Who goes there?” a voice from the ship calls down to her. Her name has not been spoken in so long she’s afraid she had forgotten it, and the names of all the others. Each one carries it’s own kind of pain, distant memories of tears long since shed. 

She thinks of the dead man laying on the floor of the sea, wrapped in a direwolf’s pelt and a thief’s bowstring. “My name is Sansa Stark.”


End file.
